Blog Archives

More Than Law and Order: Policing a Changing Society 1945-92 Susan Butterworth University of Otago Press, $49.95, ISBN 1877276995 More Than Law and Order is the fifth in the by now massive and somewhat diverse official history of the New…

Nuclear reactors We wish to dissent from the lengthy review accorded to Dr Andew McEwan’s book Nuclear New Zealand: Sorting Fact from Fiction (NZB, October 2005). This review contains errors. One is the claim that New Zealand is poor in…

Love and theft At first glance, what does and doesn’t constitute literary plagiarism looks pretty straightforward. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh certainly thought so. They tried to prove in a London court that Dan Brown took “at least 15 core…

Charles Fleming: Environmental Patriot Mary McEwen Craig Potton Publishing, $50.00, ISBN 1877333239 Before the imposition of celebrity culture on the recent New Zealand telescape and its consort media, being famous in New Zealand was possibly even more of a problem…

Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music Philip Norman Canterbury University Press, $55.00, ISBN 1877257176 What serious music-lover can imagine the world without Bach? Yet we might easily not have had him. For Johann Sebastian was the last of eight children,…

New Zealand in a Globalising World ed Ralph Pettman Victoria University Press, $39.95, ISBN 0864734956 The globalisation literature peaked at the end of the millennium, before the zero-sum logic of 9/11 subordinated its concerns to the security requirements of the…